


A Quiet Place Where I Can Scream

by meverri



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: In which I make everyone sad (including myself), Multi, Post-Apocalypse, post-s4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22437082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meverri/pseuds/meverri
Summary: Martin saves the world, but at what cost?
Relationships: Alice "Daisy" Tonner/Basira Hussain (background), Georgie Barker/Melanie King (background), Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 24
Kudos: 111





	A Quiet Place Where I Can Scream

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Mitski's "I Want You"
> 
> You can find me on tumblr @hundred-separate-lines if you want to fight me on this (I understand)

When Martin reaches Elias’s – _Jonah’s_ – office, he is alone, but he is not Alone.

The others are somewhere behind him, down in the bowels of the archives, as evidenced by the sounds of violence floating up the stairs and through the open door. They’d been swarmed from the moment they entered the institute, weapons and teeth bared, finally ready to put an end to the fear and death that had plagued them ever since Jon had read that damn statement. Only a minute ago, Jon had pulled Martin close and kissed him, desperate and familiar, before Martin had climbed up the stairs to this confrontation, his heart pounding in his chest.

Jonah is there, looking the same as he always has – a bit more vibrant, perhaps, a bit crueler around the eyes – but Martin isn’t afraid. He knows he should be, deep down, but his fear has been drowned in rage, a rage that has followed him since the moment Jon awoke from the world’s twisting and began to bury himself in guilt. Jon may have wandered the safe house for days, muttering, “My fault, it’s all my fault,” but Martin has never forgotten who wrecked the world, and now, standing in front of his old boss, it’s all he can do not to pounce.

“Martin,” says Jonah, his hands curled into fists. “How unsurprising, to see you here again. Tell me, where is Jon?”

“That’s not what you should be worried about,” Martin says, and Jonah’s eyes light up with mirth.

“Oh?” he asks, his voice dripping with disdain.

“You know,” says Martin, “you keep underestimating me. Even when you were egging Peter on, you underestimated me. You knew about my plans to betray him, yeah, but I don’t think you ever _really_ understood why.”

“You love Jon,” says Jonah.

“Yeah, I do,” Martin replies, pulling the dagger from his waist, “but I also _hate you_.”

Their fight is vicious. Martin fights with everything he has, letting his anger bubble up and out of him, letting it guide him through combat like it’s his teacher. Jonah fights, too, and he’s stronger than anyone or anything Martin’s fought before, but Martin’s spent months – years, really – in the presence of the Archivist, and he’s used to the Eye’s strength. Jonah will not enter his head. Not again.

Martin thinks Jonah might realize this, eventually, because his moves become sloppier, fear dancing across his wrinkled face. _Good,_ Martin thinks. It’s nice to be feared, for once, and not afraid.

Jonah seems surprised to be losing. Martin keeps pushing, keeps slashing at him with the dagger, and even as Jonah’s cuts heal, he slows. Martin has too much on the line to let Jonah win this fight. His beloved is behind him, locked in combat downstairs alongside every friend they have left, so Martin grits his teeth and shoves, using all of his weight to force Jonah to the ground. They grapple, but Martin lands on top, straddling Jonah and shoving down with his knife, all while Jonah scrabbles for purchase on Martin’s blood-slicked arms, desperately pushing the knife away.

It’s too little, too late, though, and Martin’s strength finally wins out. With a scream, he plunges the blade into Jonah’s left eye and _twists._

Jonah’s howl of pain rattles the world around them. Everything shudders, and Martin twists one hand into the fabric of Jonah’s shirt to keep from falling. Before he can lose his nerve, he pulls the knife out with a sickening _pop_ and drives it into Jonah’s other eye.

Surrounded on all sides by screams, Martin finally lets himself fall as Jonah stills. The room shudders again, more violently this time, and Martin pulls himself under the desk, fearing the building’s collapse. Jonah’s computer vibrates off the desk, the screen shattering into a thousand tiny pieces. One of his bookshelves topples, falling on top of Jonah’s body. A green book falls into the puddle of blood that is pooling around his head. Martin grasps a desk leg as it rattles, holding on for dear life. The world is torn apart piece by piece.

Then, unsteadily, it comes back together again.

The inhuman screams have stopped, and in their place is only a silence so serene that Martin thinks, for a moment, that he’s lost his hearing entirely. The shudders cease, leaving everything still and disorderly. Martin watches as a single piece of paper slides off the desk and wisps down to the floor, landing in that same puddle of blood.

All is quiet.

Martin pulls himself cautiously out from under the desk, groaning as he begins to take notice of all his bruises. There’s blood trickling down from a scratch on his cheek, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand. He avoids the shards of glass as he stands, taking a second to catch his breath, then bends over and feels for Jonah’s pulse. 

It isn’t there, thank God, and the relief leaves him breathless. He clutches for the edge of the desk, lets his weight rest on his arm.

_It’s over,_ he thinks. He glances out of the window and sees blue sky, a fluffy white cloud floating across it, not an Eye in sight, and smiles. _We won._

He picks his way carefully over Jonah’s body, avoiding his fingers, and makes his way to the door. Climbing back down the stairs takes more energy than he has, but he does it anyway, takes each agonizing step down to where the rest of them are waiting – where _Jon_ is waiting – to hear the good news.

He rounds the corner at the bottom of the staircase and steps over another body, this one the remains of one of the Stranger’s children. Martin still doesn’t understand why any of them would have allied themselves with Jonah, but he supposes it doesn’t matter anymore. The hallway is mostly empty now, even of monsters, so Martin hobbles toward the archives, clutching the wall to keep upright.

The staircase down into the basement is harder to navigate, but he manages. Each step is painful – Jonah must have really done something to his leg, and Martin’s surprised he didn’t notice in the heat of their conflict – but he makes it eventually, stepping into the archives with Jon’s name on his lips.

Then he looks up, and his heart stops.

About a week into their vacation in Scotland, Martin had awoken to Jon’s bright green eyes staring up at him. They were tired, as they always were – though not as tired as they’d been before Scotland, which made Martin very proud, in his own way – but the slight smile on Jon’s face made him look less like a person who hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in years and more like he had just woken up from a decent night’s rest. When Martin had opened his eyes, Jon had stretched up to press a kiss to his lips.

It hadn’t been a bad thing to wake up to, all things considered.

They’d stayed there for a while, Jon pillowed on Martin’s chest, Martin’s nose in Jon’s hair, until Jon had pushed himself up and looked back down at Martin, that same tired smile on his face. His face had been so full of love that it had nearly taken Martin’s breath away. _He loves me,_ Martin had thought, a concept that still seemed unreal. _He’s here, and he loves me, and he’s not going anywhere._

As if in answer to Martin’s thoughts – or, perhaps, in _actual_ answer to Martin’s thoughts, seeing as Jon’s powers had only grown in Martin’s absence – Jon kissed Martin again, his dry lips catching on Martin’s.

“Martin Blackwood,” he had said, “I’m going to marry you someday.”

Martin had let out a small huff of air in what might have been amusement (and what had really been wonder) and wrapped his arms around Jon again, burying his face in the crook of Jon’s neck. They had stayed there for another long while, drifting between sleep and wakefulness until, finally, Martin had extricated himself from the covers and run to use the bathroom. When he’d emerged, Jon had been making tea, and the two of them had spent the day cuddling on the couch and reading, each of them leaning over from time to time to kiss the other. It had been less than a week since their first kiss, then, and they’d blushed with the newness of it all, with the wonderful knowledge that they loved each other and that they were each loved in return. Martin had written a poem about it later, while they’d camped in an abandoned factory, and he’d read it aloud for Jon while they boiled soup over a fire, and then Jon had taken first watch and Martin had fallen asleep with his head in Jon’s lap and Jon’s fingers in his hair and had not felt _safe,_ exactly, but _safer._

Martin looks, and Jon’s green eyes – those same green eyes that had met him head-on that morning, bold and unabashed in their love for him – his eyes are open, empty, staring at the ceiling above him, at absolutely nothing at all. There is blood around them, dripping down onto the floor and soaking Georgie’s pants where she holds him in her lap, his dark hair spilling over her jeans. She looks up and meets Martin’s gaze when he enters, and tears are rolling down her cheeks, plunging down toward Jon’s lifeless face.

Jon’s _lifeless_ face.

“Martin,” Georgie gasps, and it hits him like a punch to the gut. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I tried – I mean, I told him to stay awake, I tried to help, but –”

Martin takes a step back, stumbling away from Jon’s body, his _body, oh god,_ and he falls backwards as his feet hit the bottom step. He breaks his fall with his arm, sinking until he’s half-sitting on the stairs, barely taking in the fact that Melanie, who was standing just behind Georgie, is moving toward him, one hand outstretched while the other clutches her cane with tense knuckles.

“Martin?” she says. “Martin, it’s all right –”

“No,” Martin gasps, because there isn’t enough air down here, and _Jon is – Jon is –_

The funny thing about the Entities is that they never really let anyone go, not all the way. Tearing the Eye out of Melanie had left her sightless, and tearing the Slaughter out had left her with a limp. Daisy starved without the Hunt, and Martin, for all his effort, has never quite uncurled the cold fog that squeezes at his heart every time he’s in an empty room. They’re greedy monsters, he supposes.

That’s why, when Melanie takes another step forward, it’s only a thought that pulls Martin back into the familiar grey of the Lonely.

It’s quiet there. _Even the fear is gentle here,_ he’d said, so long ago, and maybe that’s what he’s hoping for – maybe he wants to dull the fear that he will have to face every day, every _single_ day for the rest of his life, without Jon beside him. It works, in that regard, but grief is a lonely thing, and the Lonely tears it out of him, bit by bit.

He screams. He kneels in the sand and screams, his voice tearing through the fog, at a world that has finally, _finally_ broken him. He screams at the injustice of it all – at three weeks of joy, and then _months_ of pain and fear, and here, at the end of it all, only loss and Loneliness and despair. He screams for himself, and for Jon, and for Tim, and Sasha, and even for Elias, in his own way, and Peter, and the way they’ve all been torn and twisted by powers that they can barely comprehend like ants scurrying under some cosmic microscope. He screams until his voice gives out, throat aching, and then the tears pour down his face again, pulled out of him painfully, and he wonders how much worse it will be when he returns from the Lonely. These feelings, dulled in this foggy place, are still so _sharp._

He doesn’t know how much time passes. Time is funny, in the Lonely; it felt like days last time, and then when Jon pulled him out it had only been a few hours. He was disoriented for days, drifting from the institute to his flat to the car to the safe house, only feeling solid again when Jon wrapped his hand in Martin’s and refused to let go.

Who will hold him now?

Martin stands, legs cramping, and wipes away the tears. He has to go back – he knows this, knows the others will be worried, but it’s hard to find the strength to go back to that place, now that he knows what will be missing. It would be easier to stay here, to drift out with the waves, to drown here and be back with Jon again, or to be nothing at all.

He goes, though. He doesn’t want the others to worry. Always thinking of the others, isn’t he? It’s why they still like him, even after everything.

The archives are still dusty and disorganized when he returns. Daisy and Basira are there, now, kneeling by Jon’s side. Melanie has an arm wrapped around Georgie. Someone has closed Jon’s eyes.

Martin comes back, and Basira nearly raises her gun before she recognizes him. She grabs Daisy’s arm and stands, but Daisy stays beside Jon, one hand on his arm. She’s missing her coat, Martin realizes, and then he sees that she’s draped it over Jon’s chest. He supposes they didn’t have a blanket.

He kneels beside her in slow-motion, the last vestiges of the Lonely withdrawing their foggy tendrils from his heart. It doesn’t matter, he supposes, if the Lonely’s there to hold it together anymore. What use is a heart when its love is gone? He doesn’t know where he read that. He tries very, very hard not to remember.

Jon’s hair is greasy when Martin runs his fingers through it. This has been true for the majority of the last few months, of course – really, for most of the time Martin has known Jon – and it strikes him that it’s so much greyer than it was, all those years ago, when the two of them were introduced in Research. He knows he thought Jon was so much older, back then, and thinks of all the new wrinkles and lines that have dug their way into Jon’s face in the intervening years. How could they ever have been so young?

Daisy is crying. Martin has never seen her cry before. He can’t meet her eyes, now, but she doesn’t seem to hold that against him. Behind her, Basira is crying, too, and it makes Martin that much more aware of the tears on his own face. They aren’t falling, anymore, just hanging there. He looks at Jon, and he wishes that he could imagine him waking up.

After an eternity, or maybe only a moment, he leans down and kisses Jon on the forehead. It _seems_ like the right thing to do. He doesn’t know. He wishes that somehow, impossibly, he had been here when Jon died. He wishes he could have said goodbye. He wishes he didn’t know that he had killed Jon, stabbing Jonah like that. He wishes that last kiss hadn’t been the last, that there could be one more, just one more, I’d give anything for _just one more, just don’t let that be the end. Please, don’t let this be the end._

Eventually, Basira pulls Daisy to her feet and Martin follows, unsure of what to do with his hands. He decides to crouch, again, and when Basira begins to speak he scoops Jon’s limp form into his arms. He’s carried Jon like this, before, when they’d returned from grocery shopping one time and Martin had carried him across the threshold to the safe house and said “There, just like we’re on our honeymoon,” and Jon had clung to his neck and laughed, and then Martin had dumped him unceremoniously on the couch and gone to get the food, and Jon had chased after him and jumped on his back and pressed kiss after kiss to his cheek, and he’d spun around until Jon was yelling, and then he’d fallen on his side and unhooked Jon’s hands from around his neck and turned and kissed him, again and again, until the grass began to itch under his cheek and he’d remembered that it was cold in Scotland and that the food was just sitting in the car and ugh, the ice cream was probably all melted, and then they’d gone inside and eaten dinner and –

It’s a perversion, anyway, of that time. Jon is limp in his arms, his full weight leaving Martin strained and even more exhausted than he already was, but he carries Jon up the stairs anyway. The rest of them follow, a procession, as he leads them out of the archives and out of the institute and out into the streets of London.

Outside, the world is waking up. People are glancing at each other in the summer heat, disbelief in every single expression. A woman is clutching her daughter to her chest and laughing. A man is hugging his father. A person is kissing their wife.

Martin sits in the grass outside the institute – green and lush and smelling the way he’s always loved – and cradles the dead body of the person he loves against his chest, watching the world he thought they'd lost come back to life, and he feels nothing at all.


End file.
